That got us wondering how McDonalds’ recent results compared to a few other fast-food rivals. We dug into the data, and belt-tightening among North America or U.S. consumers seems to be in vogue right now.

Figure 1, below, shows the change in quarterly same-store sales for McDonalds ($MCD), Chipotle Mexican Grille ($CMG), and Starbucks ($SBUX). 

First, a few caveats so everyone understands exactly what the data above captures. For McDonalds, the changes are in U.S. stores only. For Chipotle it is all stores, but nearly all Chipotle locations are in the United States and overseas locations are essentially immaterial. For Starbucks it is North America stores, which is primarily the United States and also Canada. 

All that said, the broad trend here is so pronounced that those variations in the data probably don’t matter. U.S. consumers have been their mouths and their wallets to fast-food joints lately.

The better question to ask is why those trends are happening, and whether those root causes are company-specific or economy-general. For example, Starbucks has been suffering through same-store sales declines for a year — but that’s more due to Starbucks’ operational missteps (complex menu, less appealing stores) than to consumer unease over tariffs and recession.

On the other hand, Chipotle had been chugging along perfectly well for the last year, right until the start of this year. So perhaps its sudden same-store sales decline is more due to consumer unease with the economy.

You can pull together this segment-level data easily and quickly (the chart above took us less than 10 minutes) in several ways through Calcbench. One way is our Export Earnings Model feature from the Recent Filings page, which we’ve discussed previously. You can also hold your cursor over any specific data point you see in a company’s earnings release and then use the “See Tag History” feature to view that disclosure’s value in prior periods or export all that data into Excel. 

In short, Calcbench has numerous ways to let you get precise, industry-specific, segment-level data that opens a whole new window of analysis into firms you follow. Then you can ask better questions, get better answers, and make better decisions. 

Filed under: Food for thought.